Ruby's Greek Thread

[Oscroft]

Don't worry, you won't be able to discourage me.
If you want to explain to me what EVA is and what it isn't, go ahead, I have plenty of free time.

That's great, I'd never want to discourage a Voynich researcher - the world needs as many working on it as possible. In that I only want to encourage you - and critique is a constructive part of any process of advancing knowledge. I've read some of your blog entries where you offer proposed Greek translations of Voynich words, and it looks to me like you're employing a variety of different kinds of matches - which has to be good thing.

To expand on the partial explanation of EVA that I've already offered, I think René Zandbergen's You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. site is essential reading. In particular, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. explains not just what EVA is, but how the whole family of transliteration alphabets came about historically and their nature and purpose. To save reading the whole thing, I think the opening "Purpose and terminology" paragraph explains the core of how these transliteration approaches work. In particular...

"A transliteration should be clearly distinguished from a proposed translation of the text. The only purpose of a transliteration is to represent each handwritten character in the MS by a symbol in a computer-readable file in a consistent manner. It doesn't really matter which symbol is used for which character." (My emphasis)

That last sentence means the various transliteration alphabets, including EVA, contain no phonetic meaning. So any attempted use of phonetics, even partially, to link EVA with any real-world language is meaningless - which suggests a focus on other similarities/matches is needed.

As I suggested earlier, EVA (along with the the other transliteration methods described) is a single substitution cipher. Look at the tables presented on that voynich.nu page - they could be textbook examples of single substitution ciphers. It means Voynich researchers need to understand that with EVA (and other transliteration alphabets) they're dealing with a ciphertext, which means any apparent phonetic match with a target plaintext can only be a false positive.

I've thought of an experimental example that might help illustrate this. But I have a habit of getting rather wordy (which you will surely have noticed!) So I'll present that in a different post - though it might take me a while, as I have only limited free time.